The Personal Video Recorder is one of the fastest growing areas of consumer electronics technology. The first PVRs were introduced at the Consumer Electronics Trade Show in 1999 by TiVo, and the PVR has grown with many new abilities since that first show. The ability to record your shows to DVD is one such ability that has grown out of Home Theater's integration with the PC. Full-service PVR companies like TiVo and ReplayTV dominated the PVR when it was first introduced to consumers, but soon the digital receiver PVR made its stand. One of such Personal Video Recorder is I Class 9595 X PVR.

The digital receiver is any set-top box that includes an over-the-air tuner - digital cable or satellite TV receivers are also PVR receivers. There are new add-on set-top boxes that include PVR functionality cropping up all the time with competitive features.

I Class 9595 X Personal Video Recorder has the ability to store 6000 TV and Radio channels. It supports DiSEqC 1.2. A twin tuner personal video recorder (PVR), that can record shows on two different channels at the same time, may sound appealing, especially for sports fans. It would allow you to catch all the sporting highlights, without missing out on your regular favourite shows screening on another TV channel.

During the installation, short information is displayed at the bottom of the menu screen. After you finish the setup procedure, you can start watching TV or listening to Radio.

Setting up the tuner is pretty easy, once hooked up an installation wizard will run to pick up the channels available in your area.

From here you can use the device as a conventional PVR to browse through a channel guide to watch, record or schedule programmes. Signal quality seemed best here as we expected.

With the correct language is selected, the receiver goes right into channel reception mode. Since there are no channels as yet saved in memory, there was nothing to view.

This simply means that we have to go and ﬁnd the channels we want to watch. You can do this by pressing the Menu button on the remote to access the Main Menu in the receiver. The Main Menu is divided up into six categories (Installation,

Service organization, STB setting, STB status, Reservation and PVR. All of these categories can be seen to the right of the highlighted Main Menu category.

The most important ﬁrst step would be to go into the Installation menu so that you can tell the receiver what you have attached to it. So, now we have all these new channels in the channel list. Pushing the OK button.

Pushing the OK button while watching one of those channels will display the channel list. As you look through the channel list you will undoubtedly notice that some organization of the list will be necessary. For example, the list may include both FTA and encrypted channels. If you don't care about the encrypted channels, the now-infamous colored function buttons on the remote control come into play once again. Sorting the channel list is also just as easy.

From the channel list you can also easily switch between tuner inputs by pushing the green function button. The I Class 9595 X Personal Video Recorder also comes with a multi-picture mode that displays the still images of different channels all on one screen so that you can get a quick overview of what is currently on TV. You can use the arrow keys to move around from one image to another and press the OK button when you ﬁnd something interesting to watch. The receiver will then switch to that selected channel. Switching between channels on the same transponder required almost one second. To see a list of all the recordings that have been stored thus far, go into the receiver's PVR menu. You can use the arrow keys to scroll through the list and then push the Play button on the remote control to play back the desired selection.

The remote comes with control buttons that let you pause the playback, rewind and fast forward at various speeds and play back in slow motion. The receiver also comes with a number of other useful features such as picture-in picture (PIP). It can also be used as an MP3 player and a JPEG viewer so you can show off all those pictures you recently snapped on your last vacation to your relatives and friends.

The channel guide itself is very straightforward, it includes an 8 day schedule that makes it easy to browse listings and set up programmes to add to your recordings library. There's also PIP view that works fairly well and on the whole the remote and panel controls make it quick and easy to get where you want to go.

You can search the channel offered by the satellite for which your antenna has been configured. Press the OK button on the scan satellite of the installation. The scan satellite window will appear here. If you select the satellite for scanning and press the OK button, TV and Radio channel will start.

Press the OK button on the scan transponder in the installation menu. You can search the transponder offered by the satellite for which your antenna has been configured. Select the satellite name, LNB frequency, symbol rate, code rate polarity, code rate, scan mode and network search. You can also set the user PID.

You can reserve a channel recording at your desired time. In this mode, you can reserve channels up to 8.

If it is dupliated with the time zone that was already registered at a reservation list, the alarm message appears which it is not able to register. In this case, you must register a reservation for other time zone.

While watching TV or listening to Radio, you can get the channel list by pressing the OK button. When watching TV or listening to Radio, you can get the favourite channel group list by pressing the FAV button on the remote control. If any favourite group was not registered, then another window will appear.

Pressing the TEXT button on the remote control, the pop-up window for language selection will appear. Select one language and then you can see the teletext contents if teletext is transmitted. Even if your TV does not support the teletext, you can see the teletext contents by OSD.

Time shift automatically records the current playing programme temporarily, in case you might have missed a scene or like to see a scene again, you don't need to record it manually.

The powerful processor will have your unit operating fast and efficiently. This unit has definitely redefined what a single tuner PVR FTA receiver should behave like.